Why Czech isnt as hard

to learn as you think

by BENNY LEWIS

What Ive discovered from learning

Czech to a pretty good level



My Czechexperiment was an interesting one and Im happy

with the results and have learned a lot from the conclusions that
Ive drawn!
This post discusses particular hacks for Czech, but you can see
many more of my suggestions that would work for this and other
languages on the blog.

<img class="alignright wp-image-528 size-medium"

title="Prague heart" src="http://www.fluentin3months.com/wpcontent/uploads/2009/09/P1000698-225x300.jpg" alt="Prague
heart" width="225" height="300" />
I chose Czech randomly, and was able to reach a pretty good
level after just two months of a casual part-time commitment
(with no commitment at all in mylast month because of my
increased workload to pay off a debt; hence 2 months instead of
3). Rather than reaching a pretty good level because of some
hidden language-gene that I definitely dont have, it was because
of the techniques that Ive openly discussed on this blog, and the
general positive attitude Ive had from the very start. This
attitude was deeply rooted in the refusal to believe that Czech
was a hard language.
Rather than having this philosophy simply from repeating a
mantra like it isnt hard over and over again, I was constantly
finding evidence to support this theory as I learned more about
Czech. Today Id like to share these discoveries and the tools
that I used with those of you interested in trying this experiment
for yourself, or for anyone in the basic stages of learning the
language.



My study tool recommendations

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-540" title="czech"

src="http://www.fluentin3months.com/wp-content/uploads/
2009/09/czech.jpg" alt="czech" width="72" height="110" />I
got asked in comments a lot what tools I used to study. A great
book that helped a lot was Czech, an essential grammar, which
you can get directly from the Amazon UK or Amazon US site. It
was highly recommended to me and now I highly recommend it
to you!! It goes into great detail about word formations (that I
summarise below) and very clearly explains Czech grammar in a
straightforward and no-BS way. It doesnt waste time with
childish pictures or irrelevant examples, but goes right into
explaining the meat of the language, with full translations of all
examples used and with lots of important vocabulary in each
chapter. I just wanted the facts, explained clearly and in detail,
so this book was the best for me, but if you need a more lesson
oriented approach this wont be for you.


<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-542" title="lplanet"
src="http://www.fluentin3months.com/wp-content/uploads/
2009/09/lplanet.jpg" alt="lplanet" width="73" height="110" /
>As I often mention, I always have a phrasebook in my pocket.
Anytime I am waiting anywhere I take it out and learn some
words from the dictionary at the back, which is small enough to
get through a whole letter of the alphabet in a 10 minute wait for

the tram, while still being big enough to cover most of the
essential words. Then of course you can also learn the huge
amount of phrases from a wide range of categories squeezed into
this tiny book. The Lonely Planet phrasebook series has served
me well in several languages and it did a great job in Czech too.
There are lots of other phrasebooks, but I like the wide range of
topics covered by the phrases by Lonely Planet, as well as its
price. You can get this on the Amazon UK or Amazon US site,
but if you are passing through Dublins or Londons airports you
will see it on sale there too.
If youre near a computer when studying, there are plenty of
websites that can help too! There is a very detailed dictionary at
Slovnik.cz but sometimes it gives way too many translations for
simple words with no context explanation, so I personally
prefered good old Wordreferences Czech dictionary for looking
up simple words. I also found some great blogs including the
Czechmatediary, which is written entirely in both Czech and
English, by a Czech native living in the states. If you know of
other great websites that help with learning Czech, please do
share them in the comments.

Ignore the scare tactics!

If youve decided to learn Czech, the first thing that other
learners or (especially) natives may do is tell you how hard it is.
Its got 7 cases, unpronounceable consonant clusters, irregular
plurals, unrecognisable vocabulary, the hard-to-pronounce letter
, lions and tigers and bears, oh my!!! As a generally optimistic
person, I tend to ignore unhelpful comments like these whenever

possible. None of these news-flashes were going to help or

encourage me to make progress in the language, so I found
another way of looking at them.
Even after studying it for just a few hours, I had already found
several reasons to claim that it was easy, such as discovering that
it was a phonetic language (unlike say, French and definitely not
like English. I challenge you to say though, through, plough,
dough, cough very quickly on the first attempt) and that its
conjugation can be similar to Latin languages. Since then Ive
found other ways of looking at the issue that you may find
interesting. Im not trying to say that Czech is easy, just that
constantly focusing on it being hard is not helpful! Looking at it
the following way may motivate you and help you reach a good
level much better than trying to scare or impress you with its
difficulties ever would.

Vocabulary
When you learn French, Spanish etc. there is a host of words the
same or similar in English that really ease the blow (Ill talk
about these another time). Since Czech is in the Slavic language
branch, most words you encounter are nothing like their English
counterparts, so it can be quite discouraging when you have
hundreds of thousands of words to describe all the basic things
in life, to learn off. Even the best memory techniques may not
help when you are up against such a vast amount.
Lucky for us, Czech isnt actually made up of hundreds of
thousands of different of individual words, but actually, a much
smaller subset of word roots, prefixes and suffixes, most of

which are linked together in logical or easy to remember ways.

Czech does this way more than the western European languages
Im familiar with (which already do it to a certain extent). Let
me show you what I mean:
Lets take 4 prefixes; v, vy, od and za, (all but vy are also
prepositions) and add them to a word root chod related to the
verb chodit, to go (habitual). v by itself and in many verbs
means in so when you have something for going in you have
a? An entrance! vchod! v/vy doesnt exist by itself in this
context, but it means the opposite and you have an exit: vchod.
od by itself means simply from, so what do you think a fromgo thing would be? A departure = odchod!
Youll actually find that a huge amount of words in Czech are
formed by a small number of prefixes added to roots and a lot of
them have extremely logical meanings like this. Compare this to
the French for exit, sortie, which is impossible to understand
unless you have seen specifically that word or its verb sortir
before. I find Czechs word formation to be much more logical
and it is definitely easier to remember. So learning a new word
sometimes doesnt actually involve learning any new words at
all!
However, some examples take a bit of imagination, but are still
not that illogical if your imagination is good enough. Taking my
last prefix za with chod; za can mean behind/off, i.e. going
offstage or out of view. Well, if you are excusing yourself to go
from out of the current scene or location, you may be going
to the toilet! Czech signs say toaleta, but using the word in
conversation would be weird because zchod is what most

people say for toilet! Yes, I know Im pushing it a bit! But you
have to admit, its not that much of a stretch of the imagination!
This technique, combined with the very very many
straightforward logical combinations gave me thousands of
Czech words for very little work.
In fact, prefix + root combinations multiply. So if you
understand the vague sense associated with the main prefixes do,
na, nad(e), ne, o(b), od(e), pa, po, popo, pod, pro, pe, ped, pi,
roz, s(e), spolu, u, v(e), vy, vz, z, za and combine less than half of
them with say 10 roots that they may work with, then for the
price of learning 20 word-meanings, you actually get
1010=100 words thanks to all the possible combinations!!
When you add suffixes to the mix it helps so much for
understanding a huge amount of words without getting a
headache trying to memorise each word individually. For
example, the suffix a, which means people associated with
the root word, and the word for a medicine lk, will give you a
lka a medicine-person? A doctor!! Film is the same as in
English, but filma is film maker, ryba is fish, but ryb is
fisherman etc. So many words can be broken up like this, so
studying the prefixes and suffixes gives you an exponential
amount of possibilities to understand the language.

Grammar
When I was told that there were 7 cases for each word with a
different option for singular and plural, I was worried that I
would have to learn 14 words for each individual word. This
is not the case. Sorry Czech, but your cases dont scare me in the

least. All we need to do is change the end of the word (most of

the time, simply changing one vowel to another, but practically
all other changes follow consistent rules like h->z). It does take
a bit of getting used to that you have to remember if you are
changing that last o to an a and which case to use etc. but if you
do enough exercises or (in my case) actually talk with Czechs
and just throw in any old ending, they will correct you and it
will sink in quickly enough. This is something that you can get
used to!
In fact, it soon becomes quite natural! It may seen annoying
when starting off, since we dont have this in English, but you
must look at it from within the language itself, instead of from
English. I got so used to the use of Czech cases that I actually
find it annoying now when people use the Czech word Praha
in English instead of Prague without declining it! You cant say
in Praha or to Praha; it would obviously be in Praze and to
Prahy, duh!!
You may be sceptical to think that this is easy, but lets compare
it to other languages: Czech failed to impress me in difficulty in
so many counts and noun declensions was one of them. In Irish
we also have the genitive and vocative sense for example, but
because of initial mutations on words, when we alter a word, the
ending and the beginning is changed. A word starting with a B
changes to a V sound for example. In Czech all they do is
change the ending, and the rules are very consistent (explained
in the book I mentioned).
In French you can almost never just say a singular word in a
sentence without adding an (in)definite article, which requires

you to know its gender. Czech doesnt even have indefinite/

definite articles. Its true that they use demonstrative (this/that)
more, but translating a sentence as I saw car (with no the/a,
which complicates the sentence somewhat in other languages) is
completely correct.
However, when you do learn genders of nouns they are easy to
remember. Almost all the time a noun ending in a consonant in
masculine, ending in a is feminine and ending in o is neuter.
There are exceptions, but they follow predictable guidelines.
There may be 3 genders, but its very easy to remember which
gender a noun is, especially compared to a language like French
and to what I remembered from German, which has more
complex ending-gender association rules and can seem much
more random.

The right attitude when learning is the

key
There is no challenge in the Czech language that you cannot
overcome. The consonant clusters are tricky, but in Czech, some
consonants tend to act like vowels, so krk (neck) actually sounds
a bit like Kirk (although note that the r is rolled, and this was
one advantage I did have when starting because Ive already
learned this sound from Spanish), just with the vowel sound
reduced. When you are focused and devoted enough to the
language these noises do turn into words very quickly.
Children learn this language all the time, so a smart adult like
you has no excuses!

Its possible to retort this post with a list of reasons why Czech
is hard, but why bother? How can that help language learners?
Czech has great literature and can be a very expressive and
difficult language to master. But if your goal is to just speak it,
then there is NOTHING holding you back from this. I challenge
you to find even more reasons why its easy rather than tell me
how wrong I am about it not being hard. Give this language a try
and let me know what I missed in my quest to prove that it can
indeed be spoken quite well, quite quickly.
Apart from these tips specifically for Czech, its very important
to have an efficient study and learning method.
Dkuju you Czech, its been a pleasure!